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Saturday, January 18, 2014

Righting a Wrong: The Civil War, Stolen Documents, and a History Sleuth

Editor's note: A version of this story originally ran in The Berkshire Eagle

The court document
ordered tobacco farmer Robert Ashby Jr. to pay the local mercantile 3
pounds he owed, plus a fine of 79 pounds of tobacco.

It was dated 1753. And it was issued in Stafford, Virginia.

So how that document and another one dated some 20 years later ended up in an attic in South Worthington in 2005 was puzzling.

Dr.
George Bresnick was digging through ``the proverbial old trunk in the
attic’’ at a neighbor’s South Worthington home when he stumbled across
the documents.

``They had absolutely nothing to do with
the other papers,’’ said Bresnick, an ophthalmologist who now resides in
St. Paul, Minn. ``I was confused for a while.’’

After some research, Bresnick came up
with the only reasonable explanation: They were stolen by Union forces
from Western Massachusetts during the Civil War.

And now he plans to return them to where they belong.

It was November 1862 and Union forces,
including the 37th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which had
been mustered in Pittsfield earlier that year, were occupying the town
of Stafford, Va., as part of the Fredericksburg campaign.

The area around Stafford was overrun by
130,000 Union troops and the once pristine woods were decimated by the
force for housing, defensive fortifications and heating. Farmland was
torn up, homes were looted, and fences ripped out.

The county courthouse in Stafford
received similar maltreatment as the locals’ homes, two thirds of the
county’s records, which likely dated back to the 1660s, were ``burned,
stolen or scattered,’’ Bresnick said.

He believes the documents were taken as
souvenirs by Pvt. John D. Smith, a West Chesterfield resident who had
enlisted with the 37th and would later be killed during the Battle of
The Wilderness in 1864. Bresnick surmises that Smith sent the papers
home and they ended up in the trunk in the attic of an old Methodist
Episcopal parsonage that had once belonged to a Smith descendant.

Back
in 2005, Bresnick and his wife were living in the village of South
Worthington, across the road from the old parsonage where an elderly
woman resided. He helped go through the neighbor’s home after her death
and that’s when he discovered the legal documents. They, along with
everything else in the house, ended up with an antiques dealer. Bresnick
later bought the documents, along with many others related to
Chesterfield and Worthington, for $100.

One of the documents, dated 1776

Eventually, he came up with a plan to return the documents from whence they came, in order, he said, to ``right a wrong.’’

According to Bresnick, there are both
``practical effects’’ of the loss of Stafford’s courthouse records, the
inability to verify a deed on a property before 1862, for instance , and
the psychological effect that comes with the loss of written records
that help tell the story of Stafford’s history.

Bresnick’s plan was two-fold. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in November to hand over the
papers to U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield, who in a symbolic
gesture gave the documents to Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va.

``For documents that were clearly removed
from their place of origin to be returning after more than a hundred
years, it’s certainly symbolic,’’ Neal said. ``History has an interest
in seeing these artifacts, and I think it speaks well (of Bresnick), who
wants to really respect these documents by returning them to the people
of Stafford, Va.’’

Neal, besides being a congressman, is a
professor who lectures in history and journalism at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst. He told The Eagle he was interested in seeing
these documents returned ``in the context of their importance to
history.’’

The congressman said that people contact
his office on a regular basis ``looking to reconnect with things from
the past. Sometimes it’s about a memorial, an event or a place. This is
something different.’’

A day after Bresnick’s meeting
with the two congressman, he presented the documents to Barbara
Decatur, the Stafford County clerk of court, at a ceremony at the
courthouse in Stafford. The documents now permanently grace the
courthouse walls.

``I’m happy (the documents) are going back to their home,’’ Bresnick said.

The two legal documents that were found
in an old trunk in South Worthington were believed stolen from the
courthouse in Stafford, Va., by Union troops during the Fredricksburg
campaign of the Civil War.

The first document, dated 1753, is a
court order informing the sheriff of Stafford County to bring a tobacco
farmer named Robert Ashby Jr. (c.1720-c.1780) to the courthouse for a
hearing that May. Ashby owed the mercantile firm of Patrick and William
Bogle a little more than 3 pounds, likely from a past due store account.
The court ordered Ashby to cough up the 3 pounds along with a hefty
court fine of 79 pounds of tobacco. If he didn’t pay, the court could
then order Ashby’s personal property sold to pay the debt.

The second document was a promissory note
dated Feb. 24, 1776, obligating Joel Reddish (c. 1748-1826), to pay 11
pounds, four shillings, six pence, half-penny on a loan from James
Ritchie & Co. of Glasgow, Scotland. According to Bresnick, Ritchie
was one of the ``Tobacco Lords’’ of Glasgow who imported tobacco from
the colonies and sold it in Europe. The company was also in the business
of loaning money to farmers in order to get their tobacco crop into the
ground. Reddish was a Virginia tobacco farmer who had taken a loan out
with the company.

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About Me

I'm an artist and writer. My first book, "Gilded Age Murder & Mayhem in the Berkshires," came out in October 2015. My second book, "Hudson Valley Murder & Mayhem" will be out June 26, 2017. I'm the co-founder of Fellow Well Met, an online shop specializing in vintage, handcrafted & fine men’s accessories, which launched in April 2016. Andrew Amelinckx